AESOP Best Published Paper Award 2025

This year, 17 articles were nominated by journal editors for the AESOP Best Published Paper Award. From these, AESOP’s Best Published Paper Committee shortlisted the following five articles:

• Credit, K., Kekezi, O., Mellander, C., & Florida, R. (2024). Third places, the connective fibre of cities and high-tech entrepreneurship. Regional Studies, 58(12), 2225–2240. https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2023.2297083
• Dunn, H. (2024). Populism, Planning, and the Politics of Discontent. Planning Theory & Practice, 25(5), 615–631. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649357.2024.2437987
• Fearn, G. (2024). Planning incapacitated: Environmental planning and the political ecology of austerity. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 56(5), 1401-1419. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X241238880
• Grant, R., Oteng-Ababio, M., & Shin, M. (2024). Academic urban legend, Agbogbloshie: Sweeping away the "World's Largest E-Waste Dumpsite". Habitat International, 149, 103097. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.habitatint.2024.103097
• Stevens, Q., Daly, J. & Dovey, K. (2024). Designing for possibility in public space: affordance, assemblage, and ANT. Urban Design International, 29, 94–104. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41289-023-00235-y

The committee is delighted to announce that this year’s Best Published Paper Award goes to Harriet Dunn for her paper entitled ‘Populism, Planning, and the Politics of Discontent’ published in Planning Theory and Practice.

In this highly insightful and timely paper, Harriet Dunn explores how localist populism is reshaping planning discourse and challenging conventional political classifications. The rich empirical material collected in Knivsta, a small town in Sweden, through a long research process involving various qualitative methods, is analysed with conceptual nuance, rigour and sensitiveness, also making use of original terms to unpack particular discourses embedded in local culture and language. Issues such as anti-urbanism, anti-entrepreneurialism sentiments, insider-outsider strategies, and romanticized rural life, are critically examined, showing how discontent, often rooted in legitimate frustrations with technocratic elitism and conventional ideological binaries, is channeled into a seductive but problematic vision of the public interest as redefined by localist populism. The findings question the value of binary right-wing/left-wing classifications, argue what the public interest is and who defines it, and highlight the challenges for planners and planning, and in a broader sense, for the social-ecological transition. 

All committee members wish to congratulate the author on receiving this year’s award and are very pleased that this year’s AESOP prize for the best published paper is being awarded to an early-career scholar.